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Dear Harper
Reynolds Price, Forbes ASAP, 10.02.00

It'll be some years before you read this, if ever. But given the uncertainties of all our futures, I'll set it down here at the time of your baptism and will hope that--should you ever need it--it will be legible still. Since you're under the age of 2, chances are slim that you'll feel the need for well more than a decade. By then the 21st century will be thoroughly under way. Since it's likely to move as unforeseeably as the 20th, I'll make no effort to predict how the world will feel then about religious faith.

And I certainly won't guess at what your own relation to faith may be, though your parents and godparents have vowed to guide you toward it. Those adults have old ties to churches, though those ties vary. Above all, none of us who know you in the bright wonder of your laughing, open-armed childhood can begin to imagine who you'll be and where you'll want--or need--to go in your youth or your maturity. So here, by way of a gift, are some thoughts that may interest you in time.

As I write, in the spring of 2000, a large majority of the world's people say that they're religious. This year, for instance, 84% of the residents of the United States identified themselves as Christian, associates in the world's largest religion. What did they mean by their claim? The Oxford English Dictionary says that religion is:

Belief in, reverence for, and desire to please, a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice of rites or observances implying this.

Most Americans today would agree, and I'd suggest only one change. Instead of "divine ruling power," I'd substitute "supreme creative power." And I'd wonder if it mightn't be desirable to strip the definition to its bones--"religion is the belief in a supreme creative power." But perhaps those bones define the word faith more adequately than the word religion.

I hope you'll be interested to know that I--near the start of a new millennium and at the age of 67--am still able to believe, with no serious effort, that the entire universe was willed into being by an unsurpassed power whom most human beings call God. I believe that God remains conscious of his creation and interested in it. I believe that his interest may be described, intermittently at least, as love (and I say "his" with no strong suspicion that he shares qualities with the earthly male gender).

Whether he's attentive to every moment of every human's life, as some religions claim, I'm by no means sure. But I do believe that he has standards of action that he means us to observe. I believe that he has communicated those standards--and most of whatever else we know about his transcendent nature--through a few human messengers and through the mute spectacles of nature in all its manifestations, around and inside us (the human kidney is as impressive a masterwork as the Grand Canyon).

God created those spectacles many billion years ago and began to send those messengers, to this planet at least, as long ago as 4,000 years, maybe earlier. Those messengers are parents and teachers, prophets and poets (sacred and secular), painters and musicians, healers and lovers; the generous saints of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and a few other faiths--all the deep feeders of our minds and bodies. One of the matchless gifts of our present life lies in the fact that those messengers continue to come, though the task of distinguishing valid messages from the false or merely confused is hard and often dangerous. At least one of those messengers, I believe, was in some mysterious sense an embodiment of God; and it's to him--Jesus of Nazareth--that you were recently dedicated.

Finally, I believe that some essential part of our nature is immortal. The core of each of us is immune to death and will survive forever. Whether we'll experience that eternity as good or bad may depend upon the total record of our obedience to God's standards of action. Most of the long-enduring faiths say that we accumulate the weight of our wrongs--our sins, our karma--and will ultimately be confronted with that weight.

A wide lobe of my brain finds it difficult to believe that the maker of anything so immense as our universe--and of who knows what beyond it--is permanently concerned with how I behave in relation to my diet (so long as I'm not a cannibal), or my genitals (as long as they don't do willful damage to another creature), or my hair (so long as it doesn't propagate disease-bearing vermin), or a good deal else that concerns many religious people.

God likely cares how I treat the planet Earth, its atmosphere, and its nonhuman inhabitants (I think it's possible that he wants us not to kill or eat other conscious creatures, though I'm a restrained carnivore who feels no real guilt). Above all, the Creator intends that I honor my fellow human beings--whoever and from wherever--and that I do everything in my power never to harm them and to alleviate, as unintrusively as possible, any harm they suffer. God likely expects me to extend that honor to other forms of life, though how far down the scale that honor is to run, I don't know--surely I'm not meant to avoid killing, say, an anthrax bacillus.

Though I've mentioned that a preponderance of Americans presently share some version of my beliefs, it's fair to tell you that a possible majority of the social class I've occupied since my mid-20s--those who've experienced extensive years of academic training--don't share my beliefs nor hold any other beliefs that might be called religious. That characteristic of the intellectual classes of the Western world and China (at a minimum) is more than a century old and is the result largely of a few discoveries of the physical sciences and of the worldwide calamities of war and suffering that have convinced many witnesses that no just God exists.

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